Bring Back the Good Old Days

Party Daily Briefing, Local Cell Meeting Minutes, September 29, 2007

Excerpt:

Offender: Craig Sprout
Denouncer: Mark Tokarski

Offense: Ridicule of Party Wisdom

Party Member Tokarski
Status: In good standing
Residence: Oceania
Occupation: Party Scrivener (Level 3)
Standing: Doubleplusgood

Statement

I do hereby denounce Mr. Craig Sprout of Helena for disloyalty. Offender has engaged in thought crime, repeatedly defaming and disrespecting party members. Writes in passive aggressive tone to avoid censure by party. Evidence throughout published writings. Shows no ability to reform. Incorrigible.

Proposed Punishment: 1) Banishment to Helena, 2) public humiliation.

MEMRI Serves

In a post down below, I questioned the accuracy of a translation of a quotation by Iranian President Ahmadinejad in which he supposedly said that he wanted to “wipe Israel off the map”. Turns out he said nothing like that – the translation was at best creative, at worst a deliberate distortion designed to put Ahmadinejad and Iran in the worst possible light. And, as Mark Twain might remark, the bogus translation made its way around the world while the truth was still tying its shoes.

Where did it come from? As it turns out, it came from an outfit known as Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an American 501(c)3 (tax exempt) organization.

MEMRI’s stated goal is to “bridge the language gap which exists between the West and the Middle East”. To do this, they scour the Mideast press, and send press releases and emails to public officials in Western countries. It seems a useful service, and one would think that MEMRI would be staffed by Arabs as well as westerners to fulfill that purpose. After all, who speaks the languages better?

Not so. MEMRI is run by a former Israeli intelligence agent, Colonel Yigal Carmon. Three of six of its staff members in 2002 were former Israeli intelligence officers. There are no Arabs aboard – it is an Israeli’s eye-view of the world.

Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the Washington Times: “It’s a free country and they can print what they like, but MEMRI’s intent is to find the worst possible quotes from the Muslim world and disseminate them as widely as possible.”

And while no one says that their translations are inaccurate (despite wipe-Israel-off-the-map) there is a bias. One could easily scour the Israeli press and the massive pro-Israeli press here in America looking for defamatory comments about Muslims. There would be a rich vein to mine. But that is not MEMRI’s purpose. Quite the opposite – they serve a useful function, and a propaganda purpose, both at once.

Anyway, judge for yourself – read about them here, and here, and then go to their web site, read what they say about themselves. Find out who is behind them, and then judge the merit of their work accordingly. Let’s see if their reputation should be wiped off the map.

Tennessee Congresswoman Nailed

This was too precious to pass up. I know it is making the rounds. Tucker Carlson’s substitute host David Shuster interviews Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). She prattles on and on in mock outrage over the MoveOn ad in the New York Times, and then Shuster stone cold nails her.

Shuster: “Let’s talk about the public trust. You represent, of course, a district in western Tennessee. What was the name of the last solider from your district who was killed in Iraq?”

Blackburn:”The name of the last soldier killed in Iraq uh – from my district I – I do not know his name -”

Shuster: “Ok, his name was Jeremy Bohannon, he was killed August the 9th, 2007. How come you didn’t know the name?”

Blackburn: “I – I, you know, I – I do not know why I did not know the name…” [Snip]

Shuster: “But you weren’t appreciative enough to know the name of this young man, he was 18 years old who was killed, and yet you can say chapter and verse about what’s going on with the New York Times and Move On.org.” [Snip]

Shuster: “But don’t you understand, the problems that a lot of people would have, that you’re so focused on an ad — when was the last time a New York Times ad ever killed somebody? I mean, here we have a war that took the life of an 18 year old kid, Jeremy Bohannon from your district, and you didn’t even know his name.”

Watch it here. This is one of those rare times when I have to say that a small part of the media was indeed liberal. I’m lovin’ it.

PS: If anyone can tell me how to directly upload a video (rather than link to it), I’m all ears.

Landslide Denied

As our regular reader knows, I believe that there is significant chicanery present in American elections, and that outcomes can and have been changed by manipulation of the vote, generally by use of electronic voting machines, but by many other means as well. Some of these means, such as intimidation at the polls, are as old as Jim Crow. But electronic voting machines offer new and creative ways to change an outcome. Electronic vote counts without paper ballots give us unauditable results. Add to this the fact that the people who make the machines are Republican partisans, and that the Democrats are, well, Democrats, and you’ve got a recipe for massive fraud.

My primary evidence to support my claim is the results of exit polls, which showed John Kerry to be the winner in 2004 by as many as three million votes, and of course, Al Gore the winner in 2000. I cry a little bit for our Republic, as we have endured seven years now of a man who was not legitimately elected once. (I cry harder knowing our only alternative in 2004 was John Kerry.) If we learned anything by experience, if we were more than silent lambs, I’d have some hope.

Exit polls results have been pooh-poohed, as if when George W. Bush came on the scene, they lost their validity. Suddenly, the people who have been doing the polling so well over the years forgot how to do it, and, as it turns out, are unable to correct their mistakes. So we learned that in 2004, when polls showed Kerry the winner by both popular vote and a small electoral landslide, exit polls were wrong because more Democrats were willing to answer pollsters than Republicans.

In the past, pollsters have learned to correct for bias, to weight polls for expected deviances. But the “eager Democratic respondent” is one bias they don’t seem to be able to handle. It happened again in 2006. In the nationwide race for U.S. House of Representatives, polls showed Democrats winning by an historic margin of 55.0% to 43.5%, an epic landslide. The final vote tally was 52.7% to 45.1%, representing a difference of almost three million votes. Whatever happened in 2004 … happened again.

Two researchers, Jonathan Simon and Bruce O’Dell, have written a paper called “Landslide Denied” which analyzes the 2006 exit polls. Specifically, they attack the ‘overeager Democratic respondent” theory. They claim the polls themselves negate that excuse for variance from vote count.

The national exit poll administered by Edison/Mitofsky for the NEP is not, as some may imagine, a simple “Who did you vote for?” questionnaire. It poses some 40 to 50 additional questions pertaining to demographic, political preference, and state-of-mind variables. Voters are asked, for example, about such characteristics as race, gender, income, age, and also about such things as church attendance, party identification, ideology, approval of various public figures, importance of various issues to their vote, and when they made up their minds about whom to vote for.

These questions, known as “cross-tabs”, offer a means to measure the validity of the sample by giving the pollsters independent data by which to measure the results. Three questions asked of respondents offer a stark rejection of the overeager Democratic response theory: Approval of President Bush, Approval of Congress, and 2004 vote for president.

With respect to each of these yardsticks the composition of the sample can be compared to measures taken of the voting population as a whole, giving us a very good indication of the validity of the sample. Examining these cross-tabs for the Weighted National Poll—the 7:07 p.m. poll that was written off by the media as a “typical oversampling of Democrats”—this is what we found:

• Approval of President Bush: 42%
• Approval of Congress: 36%
• Vote for President in 2004: Bush 47%, Kerry 45%*

When we compare these numbers with what we know about the electorate as a whole going into E2006, we can see at once that the poll that told us that the Democratic margin was 3 million votes greater than the computers toted up was not by any stretch of the imagination an oversampling of Democrats.

*Simon and O’Dell deal separately with the apparent validation of the 2004 election contained in the 2006 polls. It’s an illusion. But more to the point, if there were an eager Democratic respondent bias, the numbers would not favor Bush over Kerry.

According to Simon and O’Dell, each of these three indicators match other widely circulated polls taken at the same time. In other words, there was no Democratic bias in the exit polls. It was the vote count that got it wrong.

It’s an interesting scenario. We have to assume that if votes are being flipped from Democrat to Republican that the people doing it have to be very good at it. After all, it’s being done right under the noses of tens of thousands of poll watchers and election judges. Further, there can’t be very many of them, as such a large group of people would yield some talkers.

Most likely, machines used to record votes or count paper ballots are being manipulated weeks in advance of the election either by the proprietary software installed, or by late patches and worm-like subroutines that alter vote count on election day. Further, only enough votes are being flipped as to overcome the apparent disadvantage known going into the election. In September of 2006, it looked like Republicans were losing, but not by a landslide.

2006 was an interesting election, in that all of the polls had it close up until the final few weeks of campaigning. The likely Democratic margin of victory increased from 8% on September 21 to a whopping 26% on October 26. The reason was late-breaking scandals (themselves a useful tool in manipulating elections). Democrats gave us Mark Foley. Republicans had a bad October.

Had that month not gone so badly for the Republicans, a shift of three million votes would have been enough to assure that they kept control of both the House and Senate. (Even with a majority of Democratic voters, gerrymandering would assure a Republican advantage.) Instead, what we had in November of 2006 was an historic rejection of Republicans. They were throttled. But it was largely mooted – a victory to be sure, but not so large as it should have been.

So says the Simon-O’Dell study.

This is somewhat a preoccupation with me – my attention was first drawn to the matter because of my background in accounting. In my profession, we don’t rely on honest people so much as honest systems to produce meaningful financial information. Yes, crooks matter, but by and large we spend our time trying to devise systems of internal control for companies so that errors and fraud are prevented in advance. Crooks are always with us, but we try to prevent them more than catch them.

Applying such logic to elections, we would do things differently. We would guarantee public oversight of software used in counting votes, and not allow unauditable patches. We would not put partisans in charge of precinct, counties and state election oversight. We would require not just a paper trail, but rather a paper record that represented the official vote count. We would audit results, randomly at first, and then with specific attention to those places where there was apparent trouble. Finally, we would use exit polling as a tab on results, as an indicator that chicanery might be afoot.

Looking at American elections, especially with the advent of the Help America Vote Act (a Trojan Horse if ever there was one), none of the above safeguards are in place. There is no system of internal control to guarantee safe recording and counting of votes. If there is opportunity for fraud, there is fraud.

The most perplexing aspect of this is, of course, the silence of the Democrats. John Kerry told author Mark Crispin Miller privately that he thinks the election was stolen in 2004. Publicly, he’ll have none of that. Now in charge of Congress, Democrats have avoided any election controversies, and appear ready to accept a weak paper-trail bill as a band-aid remedy to a gaping wound. Election results from the infamous Buchanan-Jennings race (where there were a full 16% of voters failed to vote in a hotly contested House race) were brought before the House. But the Democrats in charge would have none of it.

I can’t explain that other than having been a long-time observer of Democrats. They’re not much good – having them defend your cherished causes is much like sitting atop a bowl of Jell-O – you shake and quiver, in the end you sink.

But that’s not enough, of course. Not all Democrats are spineless. The standard response, that if Democrats don’t see a problem, there’s no problem, has opened the door for more and more electronic voting machinery to be installed throughout the nation, ensuring another fraudulent outcome in 2008.

Iran, Ahmadinejad, Columbia, and the Right Wing

I’m having a right wing kind of day – I was just driving and listening to talk radio. It’s amazing how they control the dialogue and have commandeered just about every outlet. And the “left” responds within the framework that the right wingers construct.

Today Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is going to speak at Columbia University – it’s probably going on right now. It’s a smart move on his part. The U.S. noise machine has made him into a caricature, a demon, as they do so often with official state enemies. By coming here and talking, Ahmadinejad is going to confuse some people. They are going to find him reasonable and well-spoken, and able to stand up and defend himself and his country in the face of a torrent of right wing invective.

It won’t make a difference, of course. This is Monday. On Tuesday, the righties and the talking heads and canned voices will be back at it again. Ahmadinejad, the real person, will slip back into the shadows, and Ahmadinejad, the U.S.-created demon, will take center stage again.

I was remembering this morning an incident back in 1989. The U.S. was gearing up to attack Panama, but lacked a valid reason. President Manuel Noriega, a former CIA operative who had fallen into disfavor, gave a speech in that country in which he said that the climate was so poisoned that it was as if his country and ours were at war. U.S. headlines said “Noriega declares war on U.S.!” And indeed a war followed. We made sure of it.

The term “jingoism” was coined at the turn of the twentieth century to describe that kind of journalism. We’ve had quite a bit of it in our history.

So when I heard that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had called for Israel to we wiped off the face of the map, I was suspicious. This could be American jingoists at work again.

It’s interesting. Indeed, he did give a speech. He said that “Zionism” is the West’s apparatus of political oppression against Muslims. He says the “Zionist regime” was imposed on the Islamic world as a way to ensure U.S. domination of the region and its assets. That’s pretty much true – the U.S. has supported the USS Israel all these years because Israel minds our business for us, using weapons we give them to police Arab (and Persian and Phoenician) peoples of the region. In return, we give Israel a free hand to do as they please with Palestinians or with real estate acquisitions. Quid pro quo. Ahmadinejad expressed hope that in the future the regime occupying Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time.

That’s aggressive, for sure, like Bush saying he wants regime change in Tehran. Only, we’re allowed to say such inflammatory things, they are not. And I note that Ahmadinejad used the word “Zionism”, which is the international political movement that was behind the creation of Israel. Broadly defined, it is the force behind Israel’s warlike foreign policy towards its neighbors, and oppression of Palestinians. But the State of Israel is a done deal – if Iran were to launch a scud missile in its direction, Iran would vanish.

So Ahmadinejad did call for regime change in Tel Aviv. But did he say he wanted to see Israel “wiped off the map”? That’s what has been reported here and repeated ad nauseum. No, he did not say that. That was an American Israeli invention. Propaganda works.

I’ve been watching closely, trying to figure out if the U.S. is going to attack Iran. They’ve no cause, of course, but that is of no matter. Prior to any attack there is always a demonization campaign, or “putting a face on the enemy”, as they say. It’s hard to hate a whole people, easy to hate an evil man. Ahmadinejad is our guy. Give a dog a bad name, then you can beat him.

I knew that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the object of scorn, but until listening to news and talk radio this morning, I was not aware of how effective the propaganda campaign has been. Right wingers are frothing. It’s ugly. Score another for the Bushies.

Some times the right wing in this country is a little more noisy and unreasonable than I can tolerate. Today is one of those days. This post qualifies as a rant. Today I’ve got no patience for righties. Don’t even try me.

A Walk on the Christian Right

I don’t think we often probe too hard into the ideas of those whom we debate. I had an email encounter with a nameless gal, and tried. I came away shaken. Is this how Christians think?

It all started innocently, a routine exchange among a small group of people – it had to do with who was going to be the next president. I predicted, without any joy, Hillary, and she said, with great assurance, that that was not the case. Then she added the following:

Scripture also tells us we’re to listen to the prophets…. and the prophets told us that ” a burning bush would arise out of Florida…” long before the votes were cast for either the primary or the final election placing Bush in office. As Christians we are to seek god’s heart in all matters, and Bush is the man for the hour.

I countered:

A “Burning Bush would rise out of Florida”? Holy Moley! Good heavens! I thought Nostradamus had been discredited, that selective and subjective interpretations of scripture had been abandoned, that people were using their noggins.

That got it going.

Some day you will answer for your pompous little attitude… God is watching.

I responded:

I love the way you snicker that I’m going to be punished by this Jesus fella – not at all like the guy in the Bible. Your Jesus is quite a brute. And then there’s the pleasure you take in my supposed demise that reminds me that, as always, you use your God as a club to beat on your fellow humans.

I also told her that non-Christians were good people too. This opened the floodgate. I poked too hard with my stick, my usual practice. I guess there are some pretty awful prophecies floating around about our coming demise. My Christian friend gave me just a taste:

I don’t snicker… you misunderstand me….. decent honorable living won’t get you in to eternity with God – only faith in Jesus – if you know your Bible….. When America is nuked in 4 major cities in one day with you still be mocking my warnings…? please remember what I just asked – for surely it is coming to pass….. please don’t swallow a camel and choke on a gnat….

By the way, the ellipses are hers – I’m not doing selective editing. Anyway, I don’t believe in prophecy. I don’t believe that anyone can know the future about anything – not the World Series or the stock market or whether my next trip into town will be a safe one.

…please. No one knows the future. Most of us don’t even know the past. If you take a dollar bill and let it go, you cannot predict where it will land or which side will be up. That’s life – confusion and chaos.

Without really meaning to, I put her in a “put up or shut up” mode.

I have had quite a number of prophetic dreams throughout my life…. I saw the second space shuttle blow up only hours before it did… I saw my mother dying – years before she did and I saw exactly how she died and it all came to pass. I also saw the tsunami in the Middle East 3 weeks before it happened. A number of people in my circle of friends and family will verify this….

So I asked her to give some future evidence, rather than past. Here’s what I got:

In one day Las Vegas New York, Florida, and California will burn; I can’t tell you which year – but it will happen…. thank you for allowing me to tell you this, so when it comes to happen you will know the gift of prophecy does exist…..

That’s where it ended.

This is rather sad. Her belief is childlike, and she is somewhat innocent, though I tremble a bit at the apparent joy she takes in forecasting the horrible death of millions of people.

This is extreme Christianity, this is what our future holds for us if the Christian Right continues to make inroads into governance. This is not a rational person. Nor is most of the Christian Right.

I walked in her shoes for a bit, and I’m still shuddering.

For Headbangers

My favorite cartoonist:

Cut the Payroll Tax

Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, has an interesting post on his blog, one that resonates with me. He’s talking about a looming recession, and doubting the Fed can do much with its short term rate cuts to stop it.

After all, he says,

Average consumers are already so deep in debt — record levels of mortgage debt, bank debt, and credit-card debt — they can’t borrow much more, anyway. With average home prices dropping faster than they’ve dropped since the Great Depression, many can’t even refinance. And given last Friday’s report showing the first employment drop in four years, people are not in the mood to keep spending.

His alternative? Cut the payroll tax.

It’s middle and lower-income Americans who spend more when their taxes are cut. And because the biggest tax they face is the payroll tax, the payroll tax needs to be cut in order to keep them spending and avoid a recession.

I say exempt the first $15,000 of earnings from payroll taxes for a year, starting as soon as possible. Sure, this may cause the budget deficit to widen a bit. But if the economy goes into the tank, the deficit will be far bigger.

The payroll tax is the silent but deadly killer, the one that the Wall Street Journal is hush about when they bray about who pays the most tax. It’s a regressive tax of 14.2% on the first $97,500 of earnings, 2.9% of everything thereafter, but on wages only. All other forms of income are exempt from it. The tax base ($97,500) goes up every year, reaching out to grab a larger share of the middle class.

The middle class, the working class, the working poor are not well organized, and therefore do not exert much direct pressure on politicians. And because half of the payroll tax is hidden from view, they don’t realize how much they pay. It’s a cash cow – what politician could ask for anything more? Consequently, you don’t hear the party of the workers, the Democrats, talking about cutting it either.

President Bush suggested granting a tax cut on the first $15,000 of payroll tax as a way of helping working people pay for their health insurance. It was nice that he acknowledged its existence. I’ll take it one step further – cut the payroll tax becuase it is time that working folks got a tax cut too. They’ve been waiting seven years now. And eight before that (Clinton never touched it). And four before that, under Herbert Walker. Then there was Ron Reagan the tax cutter … oh yeah – Reagan was the guy that jacked the tax up to its current level. He really had a thing for working people.

Before I Forget: I ran across this link at Stop Me Before I Vote Again, an excellent political blog.

Jingo Bells

There’s an interesting AP headline in today’s paper, for a story likely run nationwide:

General says Iran has plans for bombing Israel

It gets better:

Iran has drawn up plans to bomb Israel if the Jewish state should attack …

Headlines are written locally, as I understand it, and that one is seriously misleading. It does, however, reflect our current jingo-bells climate. Iran is the focus right now, perhaps we are being prepared for an attack on that country. It would make sense for inflammatory articles like this to begin showing up in the media if an attack was imminent. I wish I knew what to expect, but don’t have a crystal ball.

Notice how whoever wrote the headline assumes that Iran does not have a right to defend itself. That’s pretty common – the U.S. and Israel are openly threatening Iran with massive bombing, including the use of nukes (“bunker busters”), and that’s allowed. But if Iran should threaten to defend itself or counterattack, it’s a headline. Incredible double standards are at work.

Later in the article White House press secretary Dana Perino says (ignoring recent history)

“Israel does not seek a war with its neighbors. And we are all seeking, under the U.N. Security Council resolutions, for Iran to comply with its obligations” under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The NPT was an agreement between small countries and the then-superpowers that the the little guys would not develop nuclear weapons in exchange for our promise to draw down our own stocks. The U.S. is in violation of that treaty, has been since its inception, but that’s irrelevant. Under the standard double standard, Iran is obligated to adhere to a treaty we ignore.

It’s all very interesting. If the U.S. is going to attack Iran, propaganda will be ratcheted up beforehand, and stories like this will begin to dot the landscape. But this could be nothing – an aberration. There’s no story there to begin with, but since Iran is officially a bad guy, the non-story goes through to even our small town of Bozeman unfiltered, there to be adorned with misleading headlines.

The Strong Market Theory of Politics

Investors like to talk about market theory – weak, semi-strong, and strong. The “strong market” theory says that everything you need to know about a stock is right there in its price, that research will yield nothing, that you cannot discover anything that the market does not already know. It’s a godsend for lazy investors.

I know a guy, Melvin, who thinks the same way about politics. Melvin runs a radio station, and believes that news media is so good in this country that there is nothing to be learned in looking behind the scenes. All we need do is turn on our radio and read the newspaper. It’s all revealed to us.

Melvin read a book one time about people who disregard this theory – those of us who believe that the real work of politicians and statesmen happens behind the scenes. We are conspiracy theorists, and further, we are mentally ill. We take random information and draw dotted lines, see patterns where none exist, and try to make order of chaos. And that’s all this world really is. Chaos. No patterns, no conspiracies, no agendas. When Bushies say we invaded Iraq for certain stated reasons, we need look no further. If there were anything else to know, it would come to light by natural means.

It is indeed troubling to have one’s sanity questioned by people such as Melvin. But as with strong market theory, it’s not quite that simple.

First, I am fully aware of the theories about 9-11, and know of the John Birch Society, Bilderbergers and Trialateralists, black helicopters and intentional incineration at Waco. It’s all very interesting, but most likely these people have gone overboard. They seem to think that there are people so powerful as to be exempt from the rules of chaos – like the Rothchilds, for instance. The world is bigger than our little brains can encompass, and anyway, every action has unintended consequences. If you need proof of that, look to Iraq for guidance. Events can be influenced, but not controlled.

But people do conspire. If that sounds sinister, think of it in these terms: Parents don’t tell children everything, and certainly don’t consult them for advice. They run the family’s affairs, but allow the children to observe and even, to a small degree, participate. That’s a conspiracy.

Richard Nixon told his biographer that the American people were like little children. That’s a pretty common attitude among leaders. So they don’t often consult with us, and certainly don’t look to us for guidance. From our standpoint, it looks like a conspiracy – from theirs, they are merely managing us as a parent manages children.

I have witnessed sinister deeds, like the invasion of Iraq, and know we have not been told the truth. I’ve got a conspiracy theory.

There are extremes to everything. Birchers are extreme. They think powerful people control everything. Melvin is extreme. He thinks that everything is out in the open, that conspiracies wither in the sunlight. In this case, moderation admits some conspiracy theory, and disregards most.

Melvin is a curious example – he works in the media. His is the one place where you would expect to find probing people, yet here he is saying that probing is a form of illness. What gives?

Melvin has a few very human things going on, I suspect: One, he is a pack animal, and is terribly afraid of being a lone wolf. In media, lone wolves are not so well respected as they pretend. Bob Woodward got famous doing Watergate, but got wealthy kissing ass. The profession of journalism, despite its self-image, is not always kind to independent thinkers.

But more than that, Melvin lives in the shadow of power. He could do the kind of probing that good journalism requires, but it would only yield trouble. He’s sensible. But we all want to justify our own existences, and so too does Melvin – he has justified his lack of curiosity by ascribing low character and mental illness to those who do not march like he does.

I paint with a broad brush. There are many smart and probing journalists out there, but they are a minority, and are usually not famous. And, if they self-reflect, journalists will admit that the pressure they feel is to not go after powerful people. Let it be, go with the flow. That is true in every profession – in my own field, accounting, that’s the attitude that gave us Enron. And who knows what else is going on that hasn’t been exposed.

There’s a middle ground to everything. The world is big and complex, and even a country as powerful as ours cannot control world events. We have influence. A lot of it. But nothing is predictable save the sun coming up tomorrow.

It behooves all of us to pay close attention to events, and to never take powerful people at their word. It is the nature of power to be insecure and to want more – there is never enough control, never enough wealth. It doesn’t hurt to be suspicious. A probing mind is a sign of mental health, not the opposite. And ignorance is a refuge for lazy investors and journalists alike. The strong market theory of investing is mostly bunk, and so is a world where powerful people don’t often act in unison in private pursuit of common goals. They often don’t agree or support one another, but when they do, as with the cabal who are in pursuit of Iraq’s wealth, they can bring tremendous forces to bear.

The Bushies, who unabashedly represent the wealthiest and most powerful people in America, thought they could invade Iraq, steal the oil and make it a colony. They thought they could disguise their grab as noble sacrifice for downtrodden people. The American public likes that kind of thing, but the effort has unraveled to a large degree. These days the only people who believe the lies are die-hard right wingers and the media. If there is one thing I have noticed about the bulk of American media over the years, it is submissiveness. Couple powerful people wanting more power with a submissive media, and it sure looks like a conspiracy.

Melvin is merely ordinary. Ever heard of Greg Palast? He’s an American investigative reporter who is so uppity that he has to earn his living in Britain. That’s how it works in that profession. Melvin wants respect, he wants to pay his bills. That’s probably where he got the idea that it is better to know and see nothing.